I worry that if they evict the barge traffic during the clean up it will never come back.

"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

It will be interesting to see how the feds timetable accomodates the spawning herring and all the other fish that we heard so much about. The city had a whole slew of reasons why the bridge would be closed for a year during rehabilitation and the spawning fish was one of them.

I'm all for rejuvenating these previously contaminated areas especially in the interest of bringing the area closer to its once clean state. But I have to say.... where do they intend to put these 65 thousand tonnes of CONTAMINATED MATERIAL FROM THE SEA FLOOR?
Will this material then become 'out of sight, out of mind'? It seems that so often when we (homo sapiens) think that we have control over our environment that it rears its head to show us that we are often a bit full of ourselves.

^ Interesting question. Depending upon the contamination, I think that they sometimes incinerate it. In this case, I wonder what the actual volume of material will be? Seeing as it's waterlogged, it might not be such a huge volume.. If they're just going to haul it off to a landfill (Hartland?) then why don't they just encase the bay floor in a rubber or concrete membrane, and leave the contamination in place?

The original bay was larger than it is now, as part of it has been filled in. I wonder how much pollution is now under the businesses that have been built on that fill?

The feds plan to build a cofferdam across the mouth of the bay so that they can dredge up some 65,000 tons of polluted mud. What about the mud outside of the cofferdam that has been going up and down the harbour with the tides? How will they retrieve that stuff?

The big question is, where will they take the 65,000 tons of pollution?

Cleanup costs at a single northern mine next to Great Slave Lake are ballooning so high they are forcing Ottawa to rethink plans for thousands of contaminated sites across the country.

Documents obtained by northern environmentalists show the government expects the cost of cleaning up the Giant Mine just outside Yellowknife to be nearly a billion dollars – perhaps the largest single environmental cleanup in Canada and paid for entirely by taxpayers.

...

The Giant Mine remediation project is funded out of a federal program for contaminated sites. Beginning in 2005, a total of $3.6-billion over 15 years has been earmarked for the program. That was supposed to be enough for 6,765 known toxic sites, including 2,709 “priority” sites. They include the Lennard Island lighthouse off the coast of Vancouver Island, the Happy Valley-Goose Bay air force base in Labrador and Rock Bay in Victoria Harbour.